Abstract
Asbury Park, New Jersey, flourished as a seaside destination from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Middle- and working-class visitors from New York to Philadelphia frequented the city’s hotels, commercial amusements, and beach. During the 1960s and 1970s, as with many cities across the country, Asbury Park experienced physical and socioeconomic decline. Over the past three decades, a range of public and private actors have made several attempts at postindustrial renaissance, including privately funded waterfront redevelopment, music tourism–based historic preservation, and renovation and gentrification led by a largely gay and lesbian population. While Asbury Park’s revitalization continues today, the varied outcomes of these disparate processes suggests the significance of multiple small-scale, locally rooted investments to the postindustrial city’s sustained growth and resilience. In complement to the substantial attention scholars have paid to the mid- to large-sized cities of industrial production, Asbury Park’s story also illustrates the significance of cities of consumption—both big and small—to the history of postindustrial revitalization.
Keywords
Asbury Park, New Jersey, began in 1871 as a Christian refuge rooted in conservative values and temperance by the sea. Founder James A. Bradley, a Methodist businessman, deployed planning and policy to link modern, healthy, and moral living in his new city. Within a rectangle of land bounded by Main Street on the west, the ocean on the east, and lakes on the north and south, Bradley established a gridded pattern of wide boulevards interspersed with parks and squares (Figure 1). He located the commercial district to the south, civic and church uses on Grand Avenue to the west, hotels and beach facilities along the waterfront, and residences throughout the rest. Lots increased in size to the north, while east–west avenues grew wider—reaching 200 feet across—as they approached the ocean. Thus, both ocean vistas and breezes reached several blocks inland from the water. Conveniently located relative to both New York and Philadelphia, the turn-of-the-century city flourished. It boasted more than four thousand year-round residents and a population of up to seventy-five thousand in the summer. 1
This 1877 plan of Asbury Park, as designed by founder James A. Bradley, shows three lakes, gridded streets, varied lot sizes, and splayed avenues approaching the waterfront. The city’s West Side (West Park), located beyond the railroad tracks at the top of this map, was not annexed until 1906.
Bradley sold the city his boardwalk and beachfront holdings in 1902, instigating Asbury Park’s transformation into a working-class resort. The city soon legalized liquor sales, and trains added Sunday schedules. Bradley’s vision of an open, nature-oriented waterfront gradually gave way to new boardwalk amusements, pavilions, and grand structures by the likes of Warren & Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal. The city suffered financially during the Depression, but rebounded in World War II as the military took over several facilities for housing and training. Population grew to meet these demands; the African American population, in particular, expanded by 25 percent. Most of these migrant families chose to stay after the war’s end, settling in the congested and substandard summer cottages of the West Side. 2
During the 1960s and 1970s, Asbury Park’s fortunes changed further. As throughout the country, the post–World War II rise of highways and suburbs drew white residents out of the city. 3 Automobiles and commercial aviation offered alternative leisure options. 4 As blacks increased to more than 40 percent of the population by 1970, riots exposed brewing racial tensions. The violence injured nearly 170 people and destroyed substantial commercial infrastructure in the Southwest. In the 1980s, deinstitutionalized mental patients replaced dwindling tourists in the city’s former hotels, now turned into single room occupancy residences (SROs). Over just three quarters of a century, the city had transformed from middle-class seaside refuge, to working-class resort, and finally postindustrial ruin. 5
Studies of twentieth-century postindustrialization often focus on the mid- to large-sized cities of industrial production. 6 Yet this physical and socioeconomic process has also reshaped many, often smaller, geographies, including the industrial economy’s corollary cities of consumption. Cities of consumption (or, put differently, non-manufacturing production) provided the spaces of commercial leisure and tourism that thrived alongside sites of manufacturing labor. They include places like Coney Island, New York; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and many other, often smaller, locales connected by mass transportation to working-class housing and factories around the country. 7 Postindustrial shifts in population demographics, decreases in tax revenues, increases in crime and unemployment, and dilapidation of the built environment characterized both producer and consumer landscapes. With a present-day population of roughly sixteen thousand residents, Asbury Park vividly and compactly illustrates the postindustrial consumer city phenomenon (Figure 2).
The ruined state of Asbury Park’s Casino, designed by Warren & Wetmore and constructed at the southern end of the boardwalk in 1923, is reminiscent of the large abandoned factories from the production side of the industrial economy, in places like Detroit. Several months after this photograph was taken, the city demolished the easternmost portion of the building. The rest of the structure is still being renovated.
Beginning in the 1980s, a range of private actors started actively trying to revive the city. This article considers three approaches deployed along or near the waterfront in pursuit of postindustrial renaissance. First, private developers invested in redevelopment. The results were unfinished high-rises littering vacant expanses of oceanfront land. Second, a group of Bruce Springsteen fans, based largely out of town, sought to harness historic preservation for a music tourism–based revival. Their efforts culminated in demolition of their landmark structure. Simultaneously, growing numbers of gays and lesbians renovated and rehabilitated the city’s housing stock. Slowly and steadily, this gentrification process has yielded the most tangible results.
While Asbury Park’s revitalization continues today, its recent history of decline and attempted rebirth suggests consequences for postindustrial cities more broadly. For cities both big and small, Asbury Park highlights the significance of consumption, not only as an antidote to postindustrialization—as in the well-known cases of loft spaces turned artistic and commercial sites in places from Lowell, Massachusetts, to the SoHo neighborhood of New York City—but also as one of the enduring drivers of industrial decline and rebirth. 8 Further, the varied outcomes of the three approaches deployed in Asbury Park demonstrate the value of multiple small-scale, locally rooted investments to addressing the large-scale structural changes deindustrialization has wrought. This experience is particularly relevant to the nation’s many “small cities,” with populations of one hundred thousand or less. Despite their majority status and the somewhat larger revitalization challenges small cities can face, they have received less scholarly attention than their larger peers. 9 In drawing on its historical strengths as engines of ongoing revitalization, Asbury Park offers up one model for comparison with its many small city peers.
Waterfront Redevelopment
Redevelopment has a long history in Asbury Park, particularly along the waterfront. Yet many past plans and proposals did more to highlight the declining character of this prized asset than to spur its improvement. An urban renewal era survey found more than half of the city’s nearly 150 beachfront structures substandard. A 1959 redevelopment plan advocated demolition followed by development of new hotel infrastructure—some of which would be carved into existing historic buildings. Ten years later, an updated plan reiterated these proposals, forecasting overall growth and greater potential for resort and high-density development. Neither version of this plan was realized, thereby preserving—by neglect—the waterfront landscape for future revitalization. 10 A 1979 master plan took a more realistic perspective on the city’s declining character. It questioned Asbury Park’s viability as a major resort, while positing that the beachfront “must be fully utilized and serve as the anchor for meaningful and quality development.” 11 Still, by 1984, little had changed. Nearly 70 percent of waterfront structures were substandard, deteriorated, or dilapidated. Only three buildings were in “excellent” condition. Despite decades of calls for developer-led improvement, conditions along Asbury Park’s beachfront had only worsened. 12
Years of paper plans turned to physical action with the 1984 Waterfront Redevelopment Plan. That proposal, and its 1987 revision, placed major emphasis on development of high-density, year-round waterfront housing, while also de-emphasizing amusements along the boardwalk in favor of residential, retail, and restaurant uses (Figure 3). The plan gained traction in spring 1986, when Carabetta/Vaccaro Developers, a partnership between developers from Connecticut and Asbury Park, signed on. One year later, the duo embarked upon an ambitious project. 13
An early rendering of proposed waterfront redevelopment depicts high-rise buildings forming a punctuated wall along the eastern side of Kingsley Street, one block west of Ocean Avenue. Palace Amusements appears in the lower left corner.
In fall 1987, wrecking crews arrived at the Ocean Avenue lot located between Third and Fourth Streets. What had once been the site of a single-story restaurant, some four- to five-story hotels, commercial facilities, and parking lots was to become home to the first of several high-rise residential developments aimed at radically altering the shape of the city’s beachfront. Although the sixteen-story tower project broke with the character of the surrounding area, and even physically infringed upon Ocean Avenue itself, existing regulatory structures did not impede its construction. The design satisfied the city’s zoning code, and the developers circumvented the restrictions of the Coastal Area Facility Review Act (CAFRA) permitting process—with its encouragement that all buildings over six stories high locate in areas of existing high-density, high-rise construction—by orienting the buildings’ rectangular footprints perpendicular to the shoreline. In the late 1980s, one resident brought a lawsuit against the city for selling the rights to build on historic Ocean Avenue and on land lying between the Avenue and boardwalk. Although unsuccessful, the claim’s existence exposed the conflicts over public space inherent in the city’s attempt to revitalize its waterfront through largely private means. 14
With their fortunes so closely aligned, when Carabetta experienced financial troubles, the city fell with it. In August 1991, two years after buying out its partner’s interests and renaming the venture Ocean Mile Development Group (OMDG), Carabetta failed to obtain redevelopment financing commitments. By year-end, it missed its requisite one million dollar annual payment to the city in lieu of taxes. It would miss this deadline again the next year. OMDG then began pursuing arbitration against the city, arguing that Asbury Park was being “unreasonable” in refusing to modify their agreement in order to accommodate the company’s “excusable” delays. After the city issued notices of default, the developer filed a lawsuit. In the midst of this wrangling, the company’s financial difficulties worsened such that, on June 8, 1992, Carabetta Enterprises, Inc. (CEI) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Although OMDG itself was not bankrupt, CEI’s 93 percent interest in the limited partnership left the project in trouble. 15
A lengthy series of legal battles tied the city’s hands for nearly a decade. While CEI tried to resolve its debts, the city sought to unfreeze OMDG’s waterfront rights, transfer them to a new developer, and collect the mounting taxes going unpaid on the waterfront property. The judge ultimately found that the estate of the bankrupt party would be impeded from recovery if OMDG lost its redevelopment rights. 16 While poor legal representation and the challenge of trying its case in CEI’s home state (Connecticut) potentially hindered Asbury Park’s efforts, the city also may have suffered from bankruptcy proceedings’ limited consideration of community interests. 17 In the meantime, the potential for redevelopment-based benefits spurred others in the city to illegal activities. Two councilmen—including the mayor—served jail time for accepting bribes for waterfront votes. 18
Throughout these closed-door dealings, one building served as the visible symbol of redevelopment’s failed promise. Ocean Mile Condominium Tower, also known as C-8 (for the site’s tax map designation), was the luxury high-rise project upon which construction had begun in the late 1980s. Yet progress stalled after erection of its first twelve stories of steel framing (Figure 4). As wind howled through its openings and salt air rusted its beams, the building became a prominent waterfront eyesore. C-8 added the new blight of failed redevelopment to the city’s already tattered landscape.
The unfinished steel and concrete skeleton of Ocean Mile Condominium Tower, or C-8, added the blight of failed redevelopment to the waterfront before it was demolished in 2006.
In 2001, OMDG agreed to sell its redevelopment property and rights and $11.7 million in waterfront liens to a new developer, Asbury Partners. Although unsure whether to raze or complete C-8, Asbury Partners immediately planned removal of the portions of the structure that extended onto Ocean Avenue and threatened to turn its flared intersections into cul-de-sacs. This new design reflected both respect for the city’s physical history and the imperative Asbury Partners faced in demonstrating tangible progress upon the long road to redevelopment. The partial demolition, on August 6, 2003, was a major event, attended even by Governor James McGreevey. Over the next year, Asbury Partners sought subdevelopers for individual waterfront sites. Unlike CEI before them, they would not try to implement the full plan on their own but would serve as the “master developer” that coordinated each project’s financing by bidding out redevelopment rights by parcel. 19
In fall 2004, they signed Hoboken-based Metro Homes for the C-8 job. Metro Homes planned to complete the project, despite the sentiments of one city council member who said the city’s “dream” was that they “knock the sucker down. This building is going to be bigger than anything we would want.” 20 They proposed to call the towers “The Rising,” after a recent album by hometown hero Bruce Springsteen. But the artist asked the developer not to commercialize his music, which was really inspired by September 11. They responded with a building naming competition among the city’s school children. An Asbury Park High School senior submitted the winning name, “Esperanza,” which means “hope” in Spanish. “Esperanza” conveyed both the optimism of the developer’s original proposal and recent growth of the city’s Hispanic community (15 percent of the 2000 population). 21 Demolition crews removed the last of C-8 in April 2006 so that new construction of Esperanza could commence. But today, the building exists as two one-story foundations with rebar reaching up to empty space. New York-based real estate investment trust iStar Financial Inc. now owns Asbury Partners. When they halted Esperanza’s construction upon the real estate market’s decline, they returned the long-troubled site to a state of limbo a quarter century after its redevelopment first began.
Asbury Park’s experience highlights several challenges of a redevelopment-based approach to revitalization: redevelopment is expensive and complicated and can put much of the power in private, outside hands. With the interests of private capital and community not necessarily aligned, what appears to be an outside “savior” may not prove to be so in the end. Asbury Park’s small, part-time, near-voluntary government was unprepared to face these challenges. The city long acted as its own redevelopment authority and only hired its first redevelopment manager in 2003. Further, by partnering with OMDG for all of its waterfront redevelopment, the city failed to diversify risk. The decline of that developer’s fortunes halted progress across the entire waterfront. This situation continued until the arrival of a new “master developer,” nearly ten years later, allowed individual parcels to proceed more independently. Although C-8 remains an unresolved challenge on the landscape, it offers the benefits of experience that better equip Asbury Park to continue to pursue redevelopment going forward—both on the waterfront and elsewhere in the city.
Music Tourism and Historic Preservation
In July 1998, as C-8 sat lifeless and unfinished, five friends frantically emailed each other about another Asbury Park building. A local newspaper had just announced the impending demolition of Palace Amusements, an indoor complex on the waterfront’s southeastern edge (Figure 5). As they discussed possible interventions, the fiends did not propose to save the building. Its historical architectural merits were not their primary concern. Instead, they considered how they might rescue a small portion of the building’s aqua paint- and neon-covered concrete façade. This slab of wall held significance for them because of two important icons: a cartoon clown, named Tillie, depicted on the concrete; and Bruce Springsteen, the rock and roll legend who had helped popularize the Tillie image (Figure 6). These friends, all devout Springsteen fans, eventually organized their campaign into a more than thousand-member-strong nonprofit group called Save Tillie. Over time, Save Tillie has incorporated historic preservation and adaptive reuse when they benefited their cause and deployed appeals ranging from practical, structural arguments to personal petitions to the sacredness of a personified Tillie. Few of the group’s members lived in Asbury Park, and the organizers themselves resided in Germany, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in New Jersey. Their diverse geographies expanded fundraising reach, while service initiatives—like site cleanups and partnership with the public library to create the Bruce Springsteen Collection—grounded them locally. 22 Yet Asbury Park residents and developers have not all shared their view. Hence the battle that ensued long after that summer day ultimately yielded another failed attempt at revitalizing Asbury Park.
Palace Amusements, with Bumper Car Building at left, Carousel House in middle, and Fun House at right, sat dormant along the southeast edge of the city from 1988 until new developers demolished the building in May 2004.
Beginning in the 1950s, the paint and neon face of Tillie adorned the northeastern face of Palace Amusements. In 2000, after this cartoon clown image captured the interest of an unusual group of preservationists, the building earned state and national historic preservation listings (indicated by the plaque at the lower right corner).
Palace Amusements began in 1888 as a hundred-foot-square wooden carousel house located one block west of the boardwalk. Sliding wood and glass doors surrounded the ground level, which was topped by two hip roofs separated by a band of windows. The building’s interior housed an amusement hall and carousel. An 1890 advertisement reflects the early character of the place, which contrasted with its more raucous contemporary Coney Island: “Refined Amusement for Ladies, Gents, and Children. Polite Attendants. First-class Soda for sale in the Building.” The Palace grew alongside Asbury Park, adding the Roundabout (a Ferris wheel variant) and Observatory in 1895 and the steel and masonry Crystal Maze in 1903. In 1955, demolition of neighboring hotels cleared space for addition of the Fun House and Bumper Car Building. When a local contractor decorated the exterior of these last buildings, Asbury Park’s Tillie was “born.” 23
Local investors purchased the Palace at the outset of the 1980s waterfront redevelopment scheme. They continued amusement operations and, in 1986, opened a portion of the building as the Asbury Park Rock ’n Roll Museum. Then, after an out-of-town developer bought the building in November 1988, the Palace went dark. Over the next ten years, they sold the historic carousel and Ferris wheel, and a failing roof let in water that rotted the wooden structure. All remained quiet until July 1998 when, in light of the recent collapse of portions of the building’s second floor, the owner announced plans to demolish the whole thing. 24
A shared interest in Bruce Springsteen united Save Tillie’s members to try to save a small portion of the building. Although Springsteen grew up 20 miles west of Asbury Park, the seaside city is his adopted hometown. His early 1970s performances in Asbury Park’s dingy nightclubs earned him a steady following, and the city inspired his music: from his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, with its postcard cover; to the songs “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “Born to Run,” in which he sings, “Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard.” 25 That same decade, Springsteen posed in front of Tillie with his band for a promotional photograph. The face later appeared on T-shirts for Springsteen’s tours in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, Tillie’s advocates were not traditional historic preservationists, but enthusiasts of a particular music history; and they adopted the clown face as their symbol.
The newly formed group quickly developed a plan and lined up skilled volunteers to physically rescue Tillie from the decaying building. They would remove the section of concrete blocks and plaster upon which Tillie had been painted, transport the excavated artifact, restore the peeling paint, install the object in a new location, develop an interpretive historic display, and dedicate its new site. 26 Although the Palace contained two Tillie images, their goal was more modest. Save Tillie’s president, Bob Crane, noted, “The plan is to save one, but we were delighted that there are two in case something goes wrong.” 27 Over time, Save Tillie recognized the potential for historic preservation to help save their prized object. They gradually expanded their objectives to make preserving the entire building the goal, and Tillie’s salvage just a minimum requirement. In 2000, they successfully helped nominate the Palace for listing on state and national historic registries, earning the building honorific recognition and eligibility for restoration tax credits and historic preservation grants. Yet listing did not require maintenance or prohibit adaptations or demolition by the building’s private owner. 28
Save Tillie also sought another economic use for the building. Citing preservation case studies about rehabilitation’s lesser costs and greater boost to local taxes, as well as the potential tourist appeal of a rehabilitated Palace, they proposed making the building the cornerstone of a music tourism–based revival. Their model was Liverpool, England, which had developed a tour, preserved homes, started a museum, and opened a replica of a music club all oriented around the Beatles. 29 Save Tillie advocated tapping comparably into the Jersey Shore’s music history. The group held a music tourism conference at the public library in 2002, which included talks by a representative of London’s National Trust, the curator of a Bruce Springsteen multimedia exhibition, and local guests. 30
Their arguments could not divert the developer from plans to build a modern hotel on the site. For the investor, the Palace’s value was its location, not its history or built character. Upon receiving the demolition permit in March 2004, Asbury Partners announced its intentions to commence destruction by the end of the year—but not before removing Tillie from the façade. The firm’s chief operating officer summarized plans “to literally cut out a piece of the wall and use it in some part of the new structure, or put it on display.” In short, he said, “We’re going to save Tillie.” 31 Thus, before the wrecking crew began, a Save Tillie member lifted a sixteen-by-fourteen-foot slab of facade off the site, loaded the multi-ton item onto a flat-bed truck, and carried Tillie to a temporary storage shed. 32
Although the Palace came down two months later, Save Tillie had achieved its original goal. Some found fault with this limited victory. As the city historian commented, “It’s really unfortunate that the Save Tillie campaign diverted so much away from what was truly historic in Asbury Park.” 33 Other local residents questioned the allocation of city resources to the pet project of a relatively affluent and nostalgic group of outsiders—especially when the postwar moment of Tillie’s birth coincided with a change in the character of the city. They had little desire to preserve that image, which had been rotting in front of them for over a decade, or to slow the city’s larger economic turnaround and associated job creation. One resident commented shortly before the building’s demise, “I wouldn’t give 29 cents for it. . . I haven’t heard about Tillie in a while. . . I thought they had finally forgotten about that place.” 34 A city council member who had grown up in the city also shared this sentiment, remembering the Palace as the place he didn’t want to go—and wasn’t allowed to go—during the 1980s. 35
Save Tillie lacked not only full local support, but also necessary funding. None of its members could purchase the Palace. Although Bruce Springsteen thanked Save Tillie for their efforts along the way, he declined to step in. 36 When the Rock ’n Roll Museum opened on the site, he did not even come by. As the museum’s co-owner reflected, “The whole thing with him is he’s not interested in looking back.” 37 Although the musician has sung in and about Asbury Park numerous times, and fundraised for its revival through his concerts, rescuing the Palace was not a cause he chose to take on. Without that economic investment, and the power to exercise it upon the landscape, Save Tillie could not achieve their full potential. By positioning themselves somewhere between economic and cultural conservation approaches—as neither true preservationists nor committed investors—Save Tillie succeeded in rescuing a cartoon clown and an array of related artifacts, but ultimately had little impact on the larger revitalization of Asbury Park.
Renovation and Gentrification
While grand plans of redevelopment and preservation-based music tourism languished along the waterfront, another transformation was quietly taking shape nearby. Individual residents were buying and renovating Asbury Park’s once grand housing stock (Figure 7). By 1996, these efforts had reached a sufficient mass to warrant the city’s first annual Vintage Home Tour. Three of the nine properties on that initial tour were owned by future city council members. Nearly half of the total homeowners included were gays or lesbians. 38 Small-scale investments of time and money by these private property owners have gradually furthered revitalization in Asbury Park. In keeping with the city’s past, this turnaround has been both residential and commercial. Although the ongoing renovation process has been relatively organic, three organized steps have contributed to its success: residents’ investment and participation in real estate development; community activism oriented towards neighborhood, rather than gay, issues; and inwardly focused organization within the gay community. These steps have helped yield pockets of progress within the city’s built environment, accompanied by growing gay and lesbian political power.
Homes along Fourth Avenue demonstrate the physical impacts of small-scale, private, residential renovation. The second house from the left was included in the 1997 Vintage Home Tour. The fourth house from the left is the Stephen Crane House, a physical and cultural restoration project.
These renovators’ impact has been most visible in the city’s Lake and Northwest neighborhoods. These areas’ housing stock included relatively old, undervalued homes, located in close proximity to the lake and oceanfront. In adjacent municipalities, average residential sale prices in 2004 ranged from $750,000 in Loch Arbor to $1.4 million in Deal. By contrast, similarly grand homes in the gentrifying areas of Asbury Park sold for about $250,000. Those prices had risen disproportionately relative to their neighbors’, growing 25 to 30 percent annually over the preceding five years (Figure 8). 39 Gays and lesbians have led this growth, as evidenced anecdotally by the rainbow flags adorning many of the homes, and statistically by the census. 40 By 2010, Asbury Park had the highest number of same-sex couples in New Jersey (289). This was a 300 percent increase over the 2000 census—the greatest increase in the state. 41
Average 2004 home sale prices and compound annual growth rates (1999–2004) in Asbury Park neighborhoods were greatest in the Northwest North, Lakeview, and Waterfront neighborhoods (Analysis based upon sales data from Monmouth County Board of Taxation).
Renovation in Asbury Park has been both hobby and industry. In late 2000, one gay resident sold his home—stop no. 9 on the 1996 Vintage Home Tour—for almost $225,000, after a decade spent renovating it. By 2001, this same homeowner was back on the tour, displaying his latest work-in-progress, which he purchased for $83,000 only weeks after selling his previous residence. Another homeowner maintained his primary residence in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, but by the mid-2000s had renovated and resold four Asbury Park properties. Typically pursuing one project at a time, he often acquired the property through a sheriff sale and then took up temporary residence in the home to oversee the self-designed renovations he contracted out to local laborers. He “flipped” these projects relatively quickly, with his second purchase selling for $219,000 less than a year after he had acquired it for $92,000. 42
Gay and lesbian renovation has also shaped commercial and cultural ventures. A new owner rescued the waterfront Empress Hotel out of bankruptcy in 1996 and reopened it as a gay nightclub (Club Paradise) and later a fully functioning 101-room hotel. Other gay and lesbian–owned and –oriented bars, restaurants, and shops continue the city’s commercial and entertainment history, while also supporting the daily social and economic needs of the growing homosexual community. The Stephen Crane House, located at 508 Fourth Avenue, provides an example of cultural restoration by both gay and straight residents. The house was home to The Red Badge of Courage author, who was born in Newark in 1871, but moved to Asbury Park nine years later. In 1995, a local couple saved the building from demolition by purchasing it for $7,500—nearly the same amount Crane’s mother had paid over a century earlier. They began restoring the home and hoped to turn it into a museum. A gay school board member purchased the house in 2001 and continued the process. The house’s varied cultural calendar has since included birthday celebrations for the author, poetry readings, movies, lectures, panels, theatrical performances, and recitals. 43
Beyond investing in the built environment, gays and lesbians have also integrated themselves into Asbury Park community life. In the 1990s, they helped form the Asbury Park Garden Club to spruce up the open spaces of the city’s original plan. An early club leader was a gay resident who, along with his partner, had purchased and rehabilitated the second stop on the 1996 Vintage Home Tour. Another group, the Asbury Park Historical Society, began in 2002. The gay owner of the eighth stop on the 1996 Vintage Home Tour was among the group’s early presidents. Perhaps the most influential organization has been the Asbury Park Homeowners Association, formed in 1995 to address quality of life concerns. Gays and lesbians occupied all four of the founding board positions. The APHA initially focused on street cleaning and garbage pick-up, but eventually expanded into food drives, sandcastle contests, pet parades, and fundraising for restoration projects and an annual scholarship. The APHA also initiated the Vintage Home Tour. 44
While most of these activities aimed to enhance Asbury Park’s overall character, other strategies explicitly focused on increasing the city’s gay-friendly nature. These included efforts to market Asbury Park to gays and lesbians, assisting these individuals in practical ways as they settled in as residents, and working politically to facilitate creation of a powerful gay residential community. The short-lived Asbury Park Gay and Lesbian Homeowners Association began its marketing work in the mid-1990s by advertising the city in regional gay and lesbian publications. The association was reborn in 2002 as the Asbury Park Marketing Fund (APMF). This non-profit organization was facilitated by gay and lesbian Asbury Park residents and dedicated, according to a local gay columnist, “to creating awareness about Asbury Park, NJ, its residences, and businesses as a Gay and Gay-friendly destination.” The APMF pursued these goals through regional ad campaigns, development of a website catering to homosexual residents and visitors, participation in neighborhood events, and organization of Road Trip (now Sand Blast Weekend). Beginning in 2002, for one long weekend each summer, thousands of gays and lesbians visited the city for dance parties, dinner galas, art exhibits, sporting events, beachfront relaxation, and real estate tours. While some of the earliest Road Trip visitors found accommodations on residents’ couches, the city’s growing hotel scene soon boosted the lodging supply. In addition to increasing cohesion among the existing Asbury Park community, this festival also introduced new potential residents to the city. One realtor estimated that Road Trip 2004 alone resulted in the sale of as many as fifty homes. 45
After prospective residents learned of Asbury Park, the resident gay and lesbian community helped them settle into the city. The website www.gayasburypark.com prominently featured ads for realtors, many of whom were openly gay. Friends have also played an informal role in the real estate market, with many homes changing hands without actual listing. New gay and lesbian residents also often received a rainbow flag in a welcome basket, a symbol that helped area realtors convey to gay clients that Asbury Park welcomes their community. Some realtors have even gone a step further during house hunting trips, stopping to introduce their clients to previously placed gays residents. Once a home was purchased, many gay and lesbian residents opened their guest rooms to new arrivals while their renovations were in progress. The community encouraged the beneficiaries of such voluntary support to just “pay it forward.” 46
Gays and lesbians have been a political force in Asbury Park throughout the revitalization process, and their influence has only increased over time. In March 2004, the city became the first in New Jersey to perform a gay marriage. One year later, fourteen Asbury Park residents formed the non-profit Asbury Park Action Campaign (ap|action). The group’s objective, as articulated by its first Chairperson, Donna Harrison (stop no. 3 on the 2002 Vintage Home Tour) was to “mobilize, educate and serve as the political channel for our [gay and lesbian] community in the upcoming School Board and City Council elections.” 47 Although the group welcomed straight allies to participate in fundraising and volunteer activities, ap|action was the most overtly political gay-interested effort undertaken by the city’s gay and lesbian community. Finally, over the past decade, openly gay residents have populated elected offices, including school boards and three of the five 2012 City Council members (including the mayor). Since the city’s elected offices pay only nominal stipends, these individuals’ leadership reflects both growing political influence and serious commitments of time and energy.
Through their political actions, community-building activities, and physical renovations, the gay and lesbian community has invested heavily in Asbury Park’s revitalization. These investments, while smaller in scale and less immediately newsworthy than those of many other prospective developers, have gradually added up to significant impact on the city. They suggest the power of individual initiative, backed by financial investment and residential commitment, to begin to address some of the challenges faced by postindustrial cities. They also reveal that revitalization is more than just a physical process, but also involves social and cultural rehabilitation. By taking development into their own hands, these small-scale revitalizers have achieved large-scale effects. A combination of private funding and personal initiative is transforming the city’s fortunes one property at a time.
Conclusion
Asbury Park’s attempted revitalization remains an ongoing story. Admittedly, that story is specific in time and space and linked to a beachfront tourism industry offering potentially greater chances for revival than much basic manufacturing. Yet Asbury Park’s recent history offers some promising prospects for varied postindustrial cities if they build upon existing assets and invest in their communities from within. It shows that revitalization can come from multiple minor investors engaged in slow growth. In Asbury Park, many of the grand plans came to naught. The one-time infusion of a single private developer’s capital was intended to instigate dramatic socioeconomic shifts; instead, the company pulled out and stalled the project for years. The well-intentioned efforts of interested outsiders without a significant financial stake in revival also held their own potential, but they too realized limited ground-level impact.
By contrast with the allure of big, “silver bullet” solutions imposed from outside, tangible revitalization ultimately came from a critical mass of small-scale, locally grounded investments—albeit ones provided by relatively recent arrivals. But even this community was not entirely new to the city. Gays and lesbians have a long history on the seaside, from Brighton, England, to Coney Island, New York; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Provincetown on Cape Cod; and Fire Island’s Cherry Grove. 48 A gay and lesbian presence in Asbury Park can be traced back to at least the bohemian tearooms of the 1920s, the 1960s bar scene (subjected to police raids for perceived frequenting by homosexuals), and the first Miss Gay New Jersey Pageant in the 1980s. 49 When later residents moved to the city, they diversified the city’s risk through their multiple investments, while also building upon a strong historical foundation. By making the sites of their investments also their homes, these micro-developers made longer-term commitments to place. Critically, theirs were investments of capital—but also of more than that. As in locations like New Orleans’s Marigny neighborhood, where gays and lesbians helped spur historic preservation efforts during the 1960s and 1970s, these place-based gentrifiers’ organization around neighborhood issues, rather than gay issues, helped integrate them into the broader community. 50 Further, the slower pace of these small-scale investors’ impact permitted the city to develop over time and to learn from experience.
Although gentrification also comes with downsides, displacement in Asbury Park has thus far been more gradual and less harsh than the abuses of developer-led eminent domain. 51 The spillover effects beyond the waterfront also appear promising. The strong foundation established in the city’s revitalizing neighborhoods has helped catalyze long-overdue investment in the poorer and neglected Southwest quadrant. Along a historically rich corridor of African American culture and commerce, mixed-income redevelopment will soon commence. The fruits of those efforts remain to be seen. Yet the city’s own history suggests that their success will depend not only upon the support of the two committed developers but also upon the economic and civic investments of the broader community that makes the city—and that neighborhood—their home.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dolores Hayden, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Alan Plattus, Zachary Schrag, Pamela Karimi, and Thomas Stubblefield for valuable feedback on various incarnations of this project.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Generous funding from the Fermin R. Ennis Memorial Fellowship, Yale School of Architecture, supported a portion of the research behind this article.